Kristy Chimera
MED 300
Journal #10

	Well the students had a long weekend at Lafayette. They had last Tuesday off, then Wednesday they had review, Thursday was the citywide test, Friday they did their portfolios, and then Monday was Veterans day . So the last time they had new material was a week and a day ago. So Tuesday we had to do a quick review with them since they did not really remember what we had been doing. After a little prompting, they actually remembered that they were doing inequalities. So today we did graphing inequalities. This actually went well. At first the students did not understand why we were shading above or below the graphs. Once we showed the students that we could pick any point in the shaded area and it was a solution, it clicked. The told us that any point would work and that is why we shaded; the entire shaded region was the solution. We asked them how we knew to shade above or below the line, and they understood it was because of the less than, or greater than sign. I just hope they remember this for the Math A exam and that they remember how to shade with the calculator.
	Thursday was alright. The students were not really into what we were doing. They were participating, but they just weren’t as enthusiastic as they usually are. We did solving systems of equations by substitution. Jose was there and at first he did not want to do anything; of course he did not have a writing utensil, so I gave him a pencil. Once we started getting into the steps for solving a system of equation, Jose started to participate more. He knew what he was doing. He was shouting out what to do next to solve the equations. Jose just lacks confidence. At the beginning of the lesson, he said he did not know how to do it. Then I think he realized that he does know what to do, and that is when he started participating. I just wish he would gain more confidence. We try to encourage him as much as we can, and sometimes it works really well, but sometimes he just doesn’t care. I think the students really understood solving a system of equations by substitutions. It is a lot of steps, but when they do it slowly, one step at a time, they seem to know what to do next.